One of the great things about the various Penny Arcade Expos are the shows’ focus on smaller games. While larger publishers certainly have a presence, independent games are the true heart of any PAX event. This year’s PAX East will take this idea even further with Kickstarter Games Ca
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In case you missed it, board games have gotten really good recently. With so much of our lives mediated through screens, it’s refreshing and humanizing to play face-to-face with people. Millions of people have taken the step from the tedious Monopoly and Life of their youth to modern gateway classics like The Settlers of Catan, Ticket to Ride, or Cards Against Humanity, but where do you go from there? We’ve hand-picked this list of fantastic games to suit a wide range of players and interests, showing off just a sample of the most fun and interesting games that have been released in the last few years. With the holidays coming up, these might be just the thing you want for bringing together friends and family.

The world is being wracked by four horrific diseases. A team of experts must race around the globe to find cures before society descends into chaos. First released in 2007, Pandemic is a tense, fun, and challenging cooperative game for two to four players. Easy to learn and hard to master, it is widely considered a classic and an excellent introduction to what modern games have to offer.

Pandemic Legacy uses that foundation for one of the most exciting and surprising games we’ve ever played. Like 2011’s Risk Legacy before it, Pandemic Legacy ties each individual session into a larger campaign, with the events of one game having permanent effects on the board and subsequent games. Each game represents one month of the year and you can play each month a second time before moving on if you fail the first attempt, with the challenge modulating up or down based on how you are doing. Every month adds new mechanics from a veritable Advent calendar of boxes and compartments full of stickers, cards, and components that alter the game in both small and sweeping ways.

All at once it would be overwhelming, but the game’s gradual evolution keeps the challenge fresh and creates a gripping and twisty narrative. Over the course of the year cities will irrevocably fall, characters will form relationships and develop post-traumatic scars, viruses will evolve, and within even just a few games your copy of Pandemic Legacy will be unique. Don’t research too much because surprise is part of the fun; this is easily one of the best games in years.

This is almost as close as board games come to video games as an exciting action-RPG and tactical miniatures battle set in the Star Wars universe. In an exciting and responsive campaign one player as the forces of the Empire competes against a team of Rebel heroes that grow more powerful and acquire better equipment as the games go on. It can also be played as a straight duel between Rebel and Empire forces. Set during the original trilogy timeline, fan favorites like Darth Vader, Luke Skywalker, and Han Solo all make appearances.

This game is huge, with heaps of modular boards to create the playing area, fistfuls of tokens and decks of all sizes, and a ton of well-sculpted plastic miniatures. The set-up time involved in sorting through all this for each mission can be a drag at first, but once you get rolling the gameplay is really fun and streamlined. It’s derived from Fantasy Flight’s fantasy dungeon crawler Descent, which is itself already in a heavily-refined second edition, so all the edges have been well sanded off. Expect endless expansions for devoted fans.

Mad Max meets Snowpiercer, the apocalypse has come and gone, leaving the remaining people in small tribes fighting over limited resources in the frozen wasteland wreckage of civilization. Like the popular Dominion, each player starts with a small deck of scavengers and refugees, using a new hand of them every turn to scrounge for valuable tools and medicine, hire specialized mercenaries, and fight over valuable contested resources. All of these are shuffled back into your deck, which grows over the course of the game as you compete to be the largest and most powerful tribe.

A common criticism of Dominion and deck-building games derived from it is that they are not interactive enough, like passive aggressive neighboring games of solitaire. Arctic Scavengers fixes this with the addition of holding back part of your hand for a brawl over contested resources at the end of every round, as well as snipers and other ways to directly thwart each other. Perfect for the theme, it feels scrappy and tooth-and-nail, even when you are doing well. The most recent edition includes a huge amount of modular expansions to tweak gameplay and add even more kinds of interactivity, giving long-lasting replay value to an already excellent base game.

Cards Against Humanity has been a monumental, breakout success for board games, proving to a lot of people that modern games have so much more to offer than the tedious sessions with Monopoly and Risk from their childhood. That being said, it’s definitely not for everyone. If you’re e
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